Tories defeat motion on family planning

OTTAWA — After accusing Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff of playing petty anti-American politics and attempting to instigate a divisive debate on abortion, the minority Conservative government on Tuesday defeated by 144-138 a Liberal motion that called for family planning in Prime Minister Stephen Harper's G8 maternal and child health initiative.

The motion was the latest salvo in a weeks-long dispute between the government and the three opposition parties over Harper's pledge to mobilize resources from fellow leaders of the G8 — the Group of Eight industrialized countries — to reduce the millions of preventable deaths among women and children in the developing world.

Harper is hosting a G8 summit in Muskoka in central Ontario in June and pledged to focus on nutrition, clean water, inoculations and basic health care. During debate Tuesday, International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda told reporters the government is still committed to contraception as a possible element as well but refused to let the Liberals hijack the initiative by focusing on abortion.

The Liberal motion said the initiative must include "the full range of family planning, sexual and reproductive health options" and that the government "should refrain from advancing the failed right-wing ideologies previously imposed by the George W. Bush administration in the United States" which barred official development assistance to non-government organizations that provide access to abortion. That policy was overturned in the opening days of the Obama administration.

The Liberals were supported by New Democratic Party and Bloc Quebecois MPs. MPs in all parties questioned how access to safe abortions could be excluded from initiatives meant to help poor women live healthier and longer.

"There's a neo-Conservative agenda at work and we have to make sure it doesn't get imported into public policy in Canada," Liberal Foreign Affairs critic Bob Rae, sponsor of the motion, told reporters. He said the Liberals needed to demonstrate the influence of the ideology on policy making "so people will understand what's at stake."

"I would encourage the Liberal party to worry about saving the lives of mothers and children and not about playing petty politics," Harper told Ignatieff in the House of Commons daily question period before the vote. He noted that some Liberals oppose abortion and that one of them, MP Paul Szabo of Toronto, had characterized the Liberal insistence on abortion in the G8 initiative as opportunistic.

"The fact of the matter is Canadians want to do what they can, cost effectively, to save the lives of mothers and children," Harper said. "They are not interested in reopening abortion. They are not interested in playing petty politics in the United States."

Oda signalled early in the day the government would rally its members against the motion on the grounds it would reopen a debate on abortion and contained "rash, extreme, anti-American rhetoric."

"We believe that this motion is a transparent and divisive effort by Michael Ignatieff to reopen and reignite the abortion debate," she said. "Canadians do not want to debate that question."

While supporting the motion, the NDP issued a statement suggesting the Liberals had backtracked on the abortion issue because the word 'abortion' was not contained in the motion. But Rae, Liberal Keith Martin and other Grit MPs cited abortion during debate.

And Toronto MP Carolyn Bennett, an obstetrician, said it was unnecessary to use the word in the motion.

"No, I think that there is no need to mention abortion," she told reporters. "I mean, full reproductive services is very clear. I think that . . . termination of pregnancy is a very difficult thing for lots of people, but it needs to be there. It is, in terms of a service offered to women. We want every child to be a planned child and pregnancy and still 13 per cent of the deaths attributed to pregnancy are from unsafe abortions."

Rae said the vote was intended as a way to clear the air. The government had given so many differing responses to questions about the initiative that its policy had come down to "contraception if necessary, but not necessarily contraception."

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